Her opinion on the Norway terror attacks can be summed up with these quotes taken from her ongoing screeds against the terror victims:

“Based on these pics, seems like he’s [Glenn Beck’s] spot on, though he should have added, HAMAS Youth camp, too. As we all know, Nazis boycotted Jews and were Jew-killers. And these hateful, privileged brats at the camp boycotted Jews and sided with Jew-killers.

But what goes around comes around. You support terrorists against innocent civilians in Israel, then you get attacked by terrorists who are upset with your support . . . .

Frankly, the HAMAS charter and HAMAS’ behavior, all of which these kids at the Norwegian HAMAS youth camp cheered on, is a lot more scary than the screed and deeds of Breivik . . . .

I shed no tears for these HAMASnik campers with a Scandinavian dialect. Perpetrators are not victims. Sorry. HAMAS collaborators don’t get my pity. They never will.”

Far stronger words than Geller was willing to use. But they are par for the course as far as Schlussel is concerned.

Her prominence derives from her utility to the male conservative-dominated anti-Islamic movement. The fact that she is a woman (and also the daughter of Holocaust survivors) speaking out against Islam gives greater credence to an ideological group whose most well-known speakers are white Christian males like Newt Gingrich, Geert Wilders and Pat Robertson (the movement is, as a whole, dominated by sociopolitically conservative men, although many are not Christians).

Gingrich and Robertson, for instance, denounce Islamic attitudes towards women, while still being hostile to “feminism” under the cloak of “family values.” Having women on their anti-Islamic bandwagon helps prove their “point” about Islamic backwardness and their moral righteousness, which is a combination of faux-progressivism (treating Geller and Schlussel as intellectual co-equals) and paternalism (evoking Orientalist images of rapacious Muslim brutes). A similar logic animates the GOP embrace of Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter and Michele Bachmann. Schlussel and Geller, among others, are useful for the right (while at the same time, they castigate individuals on the left for being Islam’s “useful idiots”).

But back to Schlussel’s own anti-Islamic agenda. Before this most recent denunciation of insufficiently Zionist individuals, she famously responded to Osama bin Laden’s death by quipping “1 down, 1.8 billion to go.” When a family of West Bank settlers were murdered earlier this year, she approvingly quoted PM Netanyahu’s son’s remarks that “terror has a religion and it is Islam” and “not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims.”

Schlussel is an ardent Zionist – Hamas and Fatah are basically the same thing, in her analysis, and are dedicated to ending Israel forever. With this in mind, few individuals or institutions are pro-Israel enough for her: Republican Governor Chris Christie, for instance, is “Hamas GOP” because he appointed Pakistani-American Sohail Mohammed, a Muslim attorney who defended individuals (including Hamas supporters) that the federal government sought to extradite from the U.S. after 9/11, to the NJ State Supreme Court. Whole Foods is “anti-Israel” because it sells fair trade products from Palestinian farmers in the West Bank and has dared to wish its customers a good Ramadan (there is ill-intent behind this marketing ploy, of course). And, like Robert Spencer and Pat Robertson, she believes that mainstream media is “anti-American” (and thus, anti-Western) and panders to Islam because it is anti-Semitic, anti-Christian and anti-Western.

Both Congressmen Ron Paul (who has called for a U.S. withdraw from the Middle East and an end to the US$3 billion in aid Washington sends Israel annually) and Dennis Kucinich (who condemned the Israeli assault on the first Freedom Flotilla) are “for” Hamas, according to Schlussel. That a libertarian who caucuses with the GOP and one of the most lefit-wing members of the Democratic Party are somehow colluding to advance Hamas’s agenda is well within the realm of possibility for Schlussel: either you are with Israel (and the West – which, by extension, means you’re “with” civilization), or against it. For Schlussel, no Muslim can ever be “for” those things.

As Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hate Watchasked in its coverage of her work, why did Schlussel even bothersaying that she doesn’t support Anders Breivik when she says that “I can’t feel sorry for those who support my would-be assassins. And I don’t get too upset when they face the karma that is their fate.”

<The author would like to thank Mondoweiss’s readers for bringing Schlussel’s response to his attention>.

About Paul Mutter

Paul Mutter is a contributor to Mondoweiss, Foreign Policy in Focus and the Arabist.

43 Responses

This thing is the flip side of the Pamaela Geller coin. A bad penny indeed.

When the conservatives talk about society-wide declines in standards, are they referring to the intellectual acuity of that creature?

And I have to laugh at a has-been like Gingrich and a will-was and never-will-be like Robertson claiming to oppose Islam because of that faith’s perceived regressive practices toward the fairer sex: really, I didn’t know either one was a member of NOW or suppoted the ERA.

You know, when somebody provided me with a link to Schlussel’s blog – I had never even heard of her before – my thoughts were: “Well, what a vile, stupid person. But hey, she’s just one obscure blogger.”
But then I discovered that not only does she have a wikipedia entry, she has apparently hosted a TV show and written for major newspapers.

The problem is not that people like Geller and Schlussel exist and try to spread their hate propaganda. A racist extreme-right fringe exists in every Western country.
The problem is that they are treated as normal, respectable political commentators instead of being treated as crazy hatemongers that should be occasionally booed, but mostly condemned to obscurity.

A society in which Geller and Schlussel have a place in the mainstream media while Phil Weiss doesn’t (at least not anymore) has a problem.

Foisting the banner of Israel’s survival as an insurance policy against DNA defective goyim with organic jew-hatred always has a prominent place in the US MSM. American goy sheep run deep to their own demise.

your observations especially in the 2nd paragraph begs the question, who is giving these types of people a platform to air their islamophobic hate literature? who are the parties responsible for supporting these folks?

ever wonder why we hear of some people, but not others? i do…

a more general question would be – who owns the corporate media and do they have a particular bias?

Not just wikipedia entry, but non other then Jimbo Wales himself had to intervene and downplay ferocious but accurate descriptions of her character and deeds in article that people edited accordingly !
It was funny, but obviously Jimbo is afraid of Debbie the Lawyer !

Alas, both of these accursed daughters of darkness are more mainstream than PW or any of the regular contributors to this forum.

It’s by no means an aberration – under another handle I used to post frequently on a very obscure political message board where I was the only Israel-skeptical voice. The amount of abuse I’ve taken has been phemomenal, with accusations of anti-Semite, Jew-hater, etc.. coming fast and furious and ever-so predictably.

Those two are in no way atypical, they represent a bigger slice of opinion than any of us imagine, or feared, and the loudness and shrillness of their voices is beyond measure.

Yep. I have contact with many Christian fundies, Christian Tea Paryiers, independent feminists & male libertarians, conventional demos and repubs; messianc Jews, liberal jews, etc; across the space between NYC & SF (“fly-over country); they all have a knee jerk response to anything critical of Israeli policy; they always interpret it as wishing to kill all the jews, which has been the goal of all goys since time immemorial. They want to protect the miracle of jewish survival at literally all costs. Naturaly they never include themselves as possible collateral damage in what they fervently advocate & what they as fervently despise.

“Frankly, the HAMAS charter and HAMAS’ behavior, all of which these kids at the Norwegian HAMAS youth camp cheered on, is a lot more scary than the screed and deeds of Breivik . . . .
I shed no tears for these HAMASnik campers with a Scandinavian dialect. Perpetrators are not victims. Sorry. HAMAS collaborators don’t get my pity. They never will.”

Debbie is as sick as Geller. Sick sick people. Poisoned by elitism and hatred.

Unfortunately, Schlussel is not just some crazy gutter dweller, but a mainstream writer. And she is part of a larger movement with even bigger names on board.

All of the Islamophobic/neoconservative/ultra-Zionist individuals I’ve been writing about the past week (Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller, Judith Rubin, etc.) are quite influential – and increasinbly respectable (the fallout from the Iraq War didn’t phase them at all – America has not rejected their politics, not in the least).

Sure thing of course I get your drive, Paul Mutter. But don’t you think these kinda extremists should be ridiculed instead of ‘feared’.

Seems to me that American islamaphobes are a minority of the population but a majority in the media. These American islamaphobes should be treated like schizophrenics off their medication and roaming the streets talking crazy shit at lampposts.

They spout anti-constitutional racist garbage and call other crazies to incitement. They should be monitored by the FBI for homeland security reasons while the real media gets on with issues that affect the concerns of the majority of Americans who are NOT islamophobes.

Paul I’m really not arguing against your valuable contributions, I’m just pointing out that giving them too much platform could end up giving them the ‘appearance’ of more power they actually have.

Islamophobic neoconservatives and Christian Zionists are far more powerful inside the American power structure than you realize. In fact, they have been dominating the American government since the year 2001, and enjoy considerable support within the Democratic Party. They continue to gather power.

They already substantially control the mainstream media (especially the Rupert Murdoch media), the military-industrial complex and the Republican Party. They are determined to embroil Americans in an apocalyptic war with all Muslims worldwide. We are not talking about this issue nearly enough.

Where are the Jewish establishment and the Israel lobby on vile extremists like Debbie Schlussel? Pretty much out to lunch. Many leading members of the Israel lobby share Schlussel’s agenda.

I agree, said vile extremists contribute daily to the islamophobic mindset, giving credence to the US bipartisan war party, the drummed up fear factor that cointinues unabated to spur average Americans to vote against their own economic interests because where would the USA be without a strong military? The proven fraud that got the USA into Iraq, and keeps it there, and in Afghanistan, and Iran next on the list, continues without let up. Nobody is talking about the Debbie Schlussels in all this, and gthe Schlussels of it feed the poison, and most Americans don’t really know who the Schlussels are, nor how they are being maipulated so easily.

The main point is that a relatively small cabal of Islamophobic neoconservatives and Christian Zionists is effectively manipulating the entire American political system. Their beliefs, methods and operations need to be exposed and discussed.

I’d argue that there never really was a fallout from the Iraq War. No one lost their jobs after being so wrong about what would happen. how much it would cost and the number of lives lost. Norman Podhoritz received a medal of freedom for goodness sake!

I think that encouraged the current neocon behavior since they never suffered for the havoc they caused.

Taxi, I didn’t take offense or anything like that from your comments, but I’d like to give some clarification in any case.

I did worry when I started writing this that I was hyping Schlussel, but I feel that because her views are taken seriously by mainstream media, by people in government they merit an examination. There were a lot of people I could have picked who have blogged such sentiments on the Oslo attacks, but I picked her because she is someone people sit up and pay attention to – people who vote, people who make laws, and people who run TV stations and other outlets.

Because Schlussel et al. are *not* treated as domestic extremists by the FBI – in fact, the FBI has even produced training materials that echo and endorse their claims about “Islam” (especially Robert Spencer) – we need to spotlight their influence.

My main point was to demonstrate to our readers just how mainstream her views are becoming, and how they are linked to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. In discussing these Islamophobes’, I hope our readers will be more aware of how their sentiments are diffusing into neoconservativism and Zionism (and conservative politics in general) and will affect the prospects for greater or lessened conflict in the region.

By way of example, one of the things I would tell people who want to understand the history of modern anti-Antisemitism is to go look at the writers who influenced Henry Ford. Obscure people? Yes. But they gave Ford his Jew-bashing ideas – and Ford had a lot of influence. He did more to popularize “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” than anyone else in history, and was admired by Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin – as well as the pro-Nazi American right in the 1930s. Antisemitism was as much as part of the Ford system as the assembly line (Ford said unions were actually run by Jewish bankers, not the working man, and that as a friend of the working man, he, Henry Ford, wouldn’t let the Jewish parasites into his shop to suck his workers dry by starting unions). I’m looking to demonstrate a similar connection with these bloggers and people who have the ears of politicians (or are politicians).

It’s an irony that two peacenik Jews, one female, one male, a Rabbi, influenced Ford a lot regarding his early developing political POV. At the time they did it because Ford sought to get his country out of WW1. He agreed that international banking had drawn the US into that war. Now we have the Schlussel types working overtime to keep us embroiled in a war against the Arabs, and infiltrating the conservatives in the USA, and again, in the name of what is best for the American people as a whole. (Isn’t key that Balfour addressed his declaration to Lord Rothschild when England was tottering & could not pay its debts to American & English bankers?) link to history.hanover.edu

And don’t we have an international banking crisis once again? And what’s new about the fact those people caused the very problem they say they are now trying to save us from? Bailouts anyone? It’s always the same folks who get bailed out by the taxpayer, and the same dupes who pay for it.

Because Schlussel et al. are *not* treated as domestic extremists by the FBI

Forget the FBI. We need — in common speech — to start seeding our identification of them in any article with the preface “domestic extremist” or “domestic terrorist” as in “domestic extremist Debbie Schussel” or “domestic terrorist Pamela Geller” or “right-wing extremist Schussel/Geller.”

Why?

Think: search engine. The algorithms will bring up their names every time someone searches for domestic terrorists, domestic extremists, or right-wing extremists or terrorists.

I put this list up elsewhere recently on MW. It’s the definition of an extremist by Laird Wilcox who has been tracking extremist groups, domestic and otherwise, for over 40 years. His collection is now housed at the University of Kansas and is named after him. He created this list after studying several hundred extremist groups, large and small. Here are his 21 characteristics, which he explains in greater detail on his minimal site.

1. Character assassination.
2. Name-calling and labeling.
3. Irresponsible sweeping generalizations.
4. Inadequate proof for assertions.
5. Advocacy of double standards.
6. Tendency to view their opponents and critics as essentially evil.
7. Manichaean worldview.
8. Advocacy of some degree of censorship or repression of their opponents and/or critics.
9. Tend to identify themselves in terms of who their enemies are: whom they hate and who hates them.
10. Tendency toward argument by intimidation.
11. Use of slogans, buzzwords, and thought-stopping cliches.
12. Assumption of moral or other superiority over others.
13. Doomsday thinking.
14. Belief that it’s okay to do bad things in the service of a “good” cause.
15. Emphasis on emotional responses and, correspondingly, less importance attached to reasoning and logical analysis.
16. Hypersensitivity and vigilance.
17. Use of supernatural rationale for beliefs and actions.
18. Problems tolerating ambiguity and uncertainty.
19. Inclination toward “groupthink.”
20. Tendency to personalize hostility.
21. Extremists often feel that the system is no good unless they win.

Debbie Schlussel is the same extreme racist bigot who called for killing of 1.8 billion Muslims (including American) when she wrote:

“….one down 1.8 billion to go…many of ‘em inside US borders, with the US government at all levels kissing their asses. ….The Islamic threat long ago metastasized like a cancer because of how Presidents Bush and Obama pandered to it after 9/11 and beyond….” And then she states that Muslims are a “lethal threat to the west.”
Sorry to link to her poisonous site, but here is the Debbi Schlussel calling for killing 1.8 billion people based on their culture and religion.

She is a proud, proud Zionist and her vile web site is filled with this Debbie Schlussel feeding the sick minds of the next terrorist attack somewhere in the world, likely in the USA.

Fox news has had Terrorist Queen, Debbie Schlussel as a guest commentator. ADL goes after perceived Jewishphobia because some kids threw water balloons at a school bus in Brooklyn (which happened to be a bus for a Jewish school) but ignores the hate and calls of violence by Zionist Schlussel and her followers.

There are laws against Jewishphobic language in the public, but this feeding of violence and hate against Muslims in the world and against the US government is indulged?

Shouldn’t DHS and the entire Western security community consider anyone with the profile of Debbie Schlussel, Pamela Geller or Robert Spencer to be a potential terrorist? They are clearly inciting and endorsing terrorism against Americans and Europeans who disagree with their extremist political agenda. I strongly suspect that more terrorist incidents like the Oslo attacks are in the works since pro-Israel militants in the neocon and Christian Zionist camp are sounding increasingly hysterical about Israel’s deteriorating political status in the world.

i relate to your comments and line of questioning on this thread and question the motives of those in power… is the plan to rain mayhem down on the people of the planet to make a point of how relevant terrorism is and the need for more war and security measures to be taken to clamp down on what little remaining freedom we have? it seems so… scary world we are living in today with what appear to be crazy folks in charge…

These extremists are the real terrorists and unfortunately there are a lot of them in the USA.

According to the comments section over the JPost, there seems to be an actual belief circulating that these kids were participating in a ‘war game’ and there was a Hamas involvement. Where this came from, I have no idea. But when somebody pointed out that they were teenagers and many were 14-years-old, a couple people responded that a 14-year-old is of ‘combat age’ and therefore isn’t a child.

I wonder if this brainwashing is reversible. When Emperor Hirohito toured Japan after WWII and told the Shintoists he wasn’t a god, many committed suicide in disbelief. Most of them did not, so maybe there is hope afterall….

Jerusalem Post’s Michael Freund:
“As a blogger myself, I often find better and more timely analysis on the Web than in the mainstream media. Indeed, some of Israel’s best friends and most articulate defenders can be found in the blogosphere, where sites such as Little Green Footballs, Powerline, Atlas Shrugs, Hugh Hewitt, Debbie Schlussel and Instapundit all provide a refreshing alternative to the moral relativism and politically correct anti-Israel blather of the media.”
Cited at her blog.link to debbieschlussel.com

I am familiar with Schlussel, this is keeping with the stuff she has said and written before.
As we all know the US (thank heavens) has the 1st amendment and so no hate speech laws– which I agree with because the trade off isn’t worth it in the long run.

But….if a citizen suspects or is even just concerned about some terrorist event like that in Norway occurring in the US they are free to, even encouraged to ‘tip” the FBI on it. I think it’s logical to be concerned about the activities of those like Geller, Spenser and Schlussel, et al…if you have reason to think it’s possible they individually or collectively may be participating in some way in a movement that would lead to some violent action by someone in the US. According to their own words they believe some people deserve to be killed for their political associations
So here you go…:) I am sure you know how to phrase it. The FBI these days monitors a lot of people but it never hurts to try and bring their attention to some movement that might be a threat just in case they have overlooked the possibilities.

These crazed women are not only Islamophobic and approve killing Muslims but Debbie at least is advocating the killing of American and European progressives with her rhetoric. These is a potential here for a real right wing terrorist movement here in the US where assassination of fellow citizens is their tactic. And these people have national voices and are pandered to by mainstream Republican politicians. I am not predicting that this will happen, but there should be some concern.

This article quotes the Southern Poverty Law Center as if its a reliable source. Being put on the SPLC’s ‘hatewatch list’ doesn’t prove anything. This is quite a good article about it, if you ignore some of the nuttier comments:

Spencer is in total denial that his work influenced the Norwegian terrorist’s attacks on his fellow Norwegians. I hope all readers here read the following fact-filled article on a recent direct Twitter exchange between the writer and Spencer himself; in it you will see that even the ADL has issued a public warning to all Jews about the danger of Spencer, and by direct association, of women such as Geller and Schlussel:

…For the course of some twenty-five years, Streicher educated the German people in hatred and incited them to the persecution and to the extermination of the Jewish race. He was an accessory to murder, on a scale perhaps never attained before…..The course of Streicher’s incitement and propaganda may be traced more or less in chronological order by referring to short extracts from “Der Stuermer.” The extracts which follow were selected at random. They were selected with a view to showing the various methods which Streicher employed to incite the German people against the Jewish race, but his newspapers are crowded with them, week after week, day after day. It is impossible to pick up any copy without finding the same kind of invective and incitement in the headlines and in the articles.

In a speech which Streicher made in 1922 in Nurnberg, after abusing the Jews in the first paragraph, he went on to say:

“We know that Germany will be free when the Jew has been excluded from the life of the German people.” (M-11)…..It was to the task of educating and poisoning the people with hate, and of producing murderers, that Streicher set himself. For 25 years he continued unrelentingly the perversion of the people and youth of Germany. He went on and on, as he saw the results of his work bearing fruit.

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